How to Build Keyword-Based Flickr RSS Feeds

After I wrote the article yesterday with more resources and thoughts about information trapping, I got a couple notes from people who wanted to know how to make keyword-based Flickr RSS feeds. You have to build an URL, but it’s pretty easy. Flickr actually offers RSS for several types of searches — a full list is available at http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/ — but I’ll give you an overview for keyword-based feeds and a couple other options.

Then, add ?tags=keyword to the end to find words in the tags for each picture. You can also use the comma to stack tags. For example, this URL would build an RSS feed of new Flickr photos tagged giraffe and zoo:

and adding ?id=groupname to it, where groupname is, um, the name of the group. That’s where you might run into some trouble, as I couldn’t easily spot the actual group ID. I ended up using a site called http://idgettr.com/. Just enter the URL for the group and it’ll spit back an ID number. So the RSS feed for Creative Commons would be:

You’ll have to experiment some with your search terms when building RSS feeds for Flickr, but I recommend you try some of those general search terms that get you way too many results with a Web search. Flickr is huge but it’s still smaller than Google’s Web page index (I would guess) and my keyword-based Flickr feeds very, very rarely get irrelevant results. Try it!

The pathetic thing about flickr feeds is they offer no options for size of images; all you get are 320px wide thumbnails, although their calls to generate badges all you to specify at least up to 50opx wide ones. I’ve been using a Yahoo Pipe which rewrites the feeds to use a specified image size